Then, tentatively, he smiles, and it is the smile she remembers, the one she always loved. Also he's clean, she knows it at once. She sees it in his face. Mostly in his eyes. The carolers from Harlem sing, and he holds out the cup of hot chocolate.
"Thank God," he says. "I'd just about decided I'd have to drink this myself. That the voices were wrong and I was going crazy after all. That... well..." He trails off, looking more than puzzled. He looks afraid. "Listen, you are here for me, aren't you? Please tell me I'm not making an utter ass of myself.
Because, lady, right now I feel as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs."
"You're not," she says. "Making an ass of yourself, I mean."
She's remembering Take's story about the voices he heard arguing in his mind, one yelling that he was dead, the other that he was alive. Both of them utterly convinced. She has at least some idea of how terrible that must be, because she knows a little about other voices. Strange voices.
"Thank God," he says. 'Your name is Susannah?"
"Yes," she says. "My name is Susannah."
Her throat is terribly dry, but the words come out, at least.
She takes the cup from him and sips the hot chocolate through the cream. It is sweet and good, a taste of this world. The sound of the honking cabs, their drivers hurrying to make their day before the snow shuts them down, is equally good.
Grinning, he reaches out and wipes a tiny dab of the cream from the tip of her nose. His touch is electric, and she sees that he feels it, too. It occurs to her that he is going to kiss her again for the first time, and sleep with her again for the first time, and fall in love with her again for the first time. He may know those diings because voices have told him, but she knows them for a far better reason: because those things have already happened.
Ka is a wheel, Roland said, and now she knows it's true.
Her memories of
(Mid-World)
the gunslinger's where and when are growing hazy, but she thinks she will remember just enough to know it's all happened before, and there is something incredibly sad about this.
But at the same time, it's good.
It's a damn miracle, is what it is...
"Are you cold?" he asks.
"No, I'm okay. Why?"
"You shivered."
"It's the sweetness of the cream." Then, looking at him as she does it, she pokes her tongue out and licks a bit of the nutmeg-dusted foam.
"If you aren't cold now, you will be," he says. "WRKO says the temperature's gonna drop twenty degrees tonight. So I bought you something." From his back pocket he takes a knitted cap, the kind you can pull down over your ears. She looks at the front of it and sees the words there printed in red: MERRY CHRISTMAS...
"Bought it in Brendio's, on Fifth Avenue," he says.
Susannah has never heard of Brendio's. Brentano's, maybe-the bookstore-but not Brendio's. But of course in the America where she grew up, she never heard of Nozz-A-La or Takuro Spirit automobiles, either. "Did your voices tell you to buy it?" Teasing him a little now.
He blushes. "Actually, you know, they sort of did. Try it on."
It's a perfect fit.
"Tell me something," she says. "Who's the President? You're not going to tell me it's Ronald Reagan, are you?"
He looks at her incredulously for a moment, and then smiles. "What? That old actor who used to host Death Valley Days on TV? You're kidding, right?"
"Nope. I always thought you were the one who was kidding about Ronnie Reagan, Eddie."
"I don't know what you mean."
"That's okay, just tell me who the President is."
"Gary Hart," he says, as if speaking to a child. "From Colorado.
He almost dropped out of the race in 1980-as I'm sure you know-over that Monkey Business business. Then he said
"Fuck em if they can't take a joke' and hung on in there. Ended up winning in a landslide."
His smile fades a little as he studies her.
"You're not kidding me, are you?"
"Are you kidding me about the voices? The ones you hear in our head? The ones that wake you up at two in the morning?"
Eddie looks almost shocked. "How can you know that?"
"It's a long story. Maybe someday I'll tell you." If I can still remember, she thinks.
"It's not just the voices."
"No?"
"No. I've been dreaming of you. For months now. I've been